Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

by Katherine May

Mostly I am nobody when I wake up, just a consciousness in the darkness trying to piece it all together. It is a strange, free-floating moment, an unanchoring of the self. It is an interlude, like held breath. Eventually it releases, the lungs fill, the world floods in. A reassuring upload of facts. A reboot. I am back.

Perhaps I can place careful stitches to hold me in place.

We are tired. We are the deep bone-tired of people who no longer feel at home.

Meanwhile, at the edge of consciousness, we sense a kind of absence. It is not so easy to articulate, but it carries its own dark middle-of-the-night fear, its own harrowing. It’s the sense that we have become disconnected from meaning in a way that we don’t even know how to perceive. We sense it when we worry that we cannot stem the flow of our materialism. We sense it when the pull of our smartphones feels a lot like an addiction. We sense it when we realise that our lives are lived in the controlled climate of air conditioning, but we still don’t want to feel the weather outside.

Something has been lost here, vanished beyond living memory: a fluency in the experiences that have patterned humanity since we began. We have surrendered the rites of passage that used to take us from birth to death, and in doing so, have rendered many parts of our experience unspeakable. We witness them anyway, separately, mutely, in studied isolation from our friends and neighbours who are doing the same. Centuries of knowledge are lost in this silence, generations of fellowship. Constantly surrounded by conversation, we are nevertheless chronically lonely.

Enchantment is small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory. It relies on small doses of awe, almost homeopathic: those quiet traces of fascination that are found only when we look for them. It is the sense that we are joined together in one continuous thread of existence with the elements constituting this earth, and that there is a potency trapped in this interconnection, a tingle on the border of our perception. It is the forgotten seam in our geology, the elusive particle that binds our unstable matter: the ability to sense magic in the everyday, to channel it through our minds and bodies, to be sustained by it.

I knew that this was not technically beautiful, but I found magic in the way that the outside world could ghost through my room.

Enchantment came so easily to me as a child, but I wrongly thought it was small, parochial, a shameful thing to be put away in the rush towards adulthood. Now I wonder how I can find it again. It turns out that it had nothing to do with beauty after all—not in any grand objective sense. I think instead that when I was young, it came from a deep engagement with the world around me, the particular quality of experience that accompanies close attention, the sense of contact that emerges from noticing. I

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, really. It’s nothing, but it’s also all-encompassing. I feel strangely empty, devoid of thought and energy. I am not sure where my days go, but they go. Every single thing I must do—any hint of a demand—grinds against me. I resent it all. I want to be left, quietly, alone. I don’t know what I’d do in that time should I ever achieve that perfect aloneness. I like to think I would read, but in truth I would probably sleep. I don’t have the attention for reading. I don’t have the attention for anything, really. My brain feels entirely separate from me. It is empty, but it also cannot take any more in. It seems that it’s a useless organ, endlessly refusing to notice what I want it to notice. It will not engage. It just glances off everything, a pale beam.

burnout. We are, all of us, charred remains, nothing left of us but blackened bones.

Burnout comes when you spend too long ignoring your own needs. It is an incremental sickening that builds from exhaustion upon exhaustion, overwhelm upon overwhelm.

I am supposed to be writing, but I lack the solidity to do it. What is there to say anyway?

How do we worship now? How do we get past the blunt knowing of our disenchanted age and tap back into the magic that we used to perceive everywhere?

can think of no greater pleasure than a stone in the hand, the right one of just the right size.

My egg rock, i wonder where it is

It occurs to me that I am resting. It is not the same as doing nothing. Resting like this is something active, chosen, alert, something rare and precious.

Stone remembers just like clay, but it is we, the humans, who often split at the seams.

It seems to me that this was a very different way of knowing, one that was embedded in the body rather than hived off into the mind, and which was fundamentally more complex than our current habits of thought. Imagine moving through a place where each landmark unpacks its own mythology, grand stories unfolding around you as you go about your daily business, transcendence happening in real time. Even in the day-to-day, you could not avoid reflecting on the big moral and ethical questions of life, because they would be present, unavoidable. Over a lifetime, you would approach these ideas in a million different ways. Our most familiar places would become maps of myth and wisdom, blooming around us like fractals, inviting us into an ever more nuanced engagement with meaning.

Bring questions into this space and you will receive a reply, though not an answer. Deep terrain offers up multiplicity, forked paths, symbolic meaning. It schools you in compromise, in shifting interpretation. It will mute your rationality and make you believe in magic. It removes time from the clock face and reveals the greater truth of its operation, its circularity and its vastness. It will show you rocks of unfathomable age and bursts of life so ephemeral that they are barely there. It will show you the crawl of geological ages, the gradual change of the seasons, and the countless micro-seasons that happen across the year. It will demand your knowledge: the kind of knowledge that’s experiential, the kind of knowledge that comes with study. Know it—name it—and it will reward you only with more layers of detail, more frustrating revelations of your own ignorance. A deep terrain is a life’s work. It will beguile, nourish, and sustain you through decades, only to finally prove that you, too, are ephemeral compared to the rocks and the trees.

After a while, because I can’t resist it, I say, “Is it nice there, in your head?” A pause. He turns to me slowly, his eyes blinking as he surfaces. “Sometimes I feel like my mind is growing branches,” he says. “Yes,” I say, delighted at this point of contact. “Yes! I know that feeling exactly.” “And every time you talk to me, you cut one of them off.”

But that would be cutting off his branches. My son must make his own holy ground. He must find his own hierophanies, in his own way, without my interference. Sacred places are no longer given to us, and they are rarely shared between whole communities. They are now containers for our own knowing, our own meanings. They don’t translate across minds. It falls on us to keep them.

Shoes are the business of the outside world, part of the artifice we all adopt when we close the front door behind us. They are more than a protection from pebbles and dirt and broken glass. You take off your shoes when you come home. You do it to keep the floors clean, but also to show how you trust this space to treat you kindly. You do it to spread your toes. When you take off your shoes, you show a little of your interior, your holey socks and your rough heels. You remove your worldly effects in deference to the comfort of the house.

Our bodies have answers to questions that we don’t know how to ask.

I’m ashamed now that I didn’t see it: the patriarchal way that we frame spiritual development, the way that men get enlightenment and women get to look after them as they do so, all the while getting mocked for the compromised practices they create in the scraps of time that remain. I appreciate the value of the monastic tradition, and I understand that some insights can come only from true solitude, but I also see very clearly how it prizes masculine knowledge over feminine, diminishing the wisdom of those of us who by necessity are anchored to the everyday.

Few of the wise souls who have devoted years to contemplating the structure of the cosmos could tell us how to practise in circumstances like this. I want them to come and learn what I know, too, and what many other patient souls could share. I want them to experience the discipline of forever being pulled away from the interior, always feeling that the work of the mind and the body is just out of reach. They would have to live through the exhaustion and the frustration and the isolation, and choose to wholeheartedly give care over and over again, rather than to walk away. I want them to strive to attain the mental and physical discipline of getting out of bed in the middle of the night and still find gentleness rather than fury. I want them to understand that they know nothing until they have endured endless spiritual deferment, the balm of contemplation forever at one remove.

As I got older, I noticed more about how she waxes and wanes, and I began to remodel her in my mind: perhaps she was just like me, sometimes round with power and sometimes dissolving into the sky, eternally shifting shape, restless. By then, I no longer thought I was the centre of the universe, and so it felt as though the moon needed me to notice her, too. Our relationship was reciprocal. When I stepped outside at night, we witnessed each other, and that was all that needed to happen. I couldn’t ask the moon for anything. But between us, it felt like an exchange of information between two entities who know what it is to endure constant change.

Danger, when it is always imminent, does harm. It doesn’t need to actually arrive. You exhaust yourself in the act of forever looking over your shoulder. Your body readies itself to fight and never quite discharges that chemical cocktail. You channel it instead into anger and self-pity and anxiety and hopelessness. You divert it into work. But really what you do, with every fibre of your being, is watch. You are incessantly, exhaustingly alert. You don’t dare ever let up, just in case the danger takes advantage of your inattention. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to have space in my brain for anything other than watching.

I close my eyes and let my mind sink downwards. I relieve myself of the duty to search for language. I let myself feel instead. I sit there, embodied, immersed in the relief of it.

I want to throw up my hands and say, Let’s stop this here. I’m clearly not cut out to be a swimmer. But I know that’s just my ego talking. I’ve been thrown off-balance, as I so often am. It takes humility to get through a process like this, and that’s what I’m trying to gather about me right now. If I want to swim better, I need to know nothing—be nothing—for a while. I need to put myself into somebody else’s hands and allow them to reform me. I need to let go of the part of me that knows better, the part of me that thinks I’m doing it right, the part of me that wants everyone else to believe I’m perfect. I’m not learning so much as unlearning.

But most of all, I miss the sense of worship that comes when I get into the sea. I miss the feeling that I am entering a vast cathedral, and, rather than sitting in its dry pews, that I am merging with it. I miss how when I feel the pull of the tides, I am also feeling the pull of the whole world, of the moon and the sun; that I am part of a chain of interconnection that crosses galaxies.

We are a forgetful species, obsessed with the endless succession of tasks that hover over our days, and negligent of the grand celestial drama unfolding around us. And here I am, remembering.

you must confront your own yearning to make meaning. The water reflects only your troubled face. You are the one who fills the well.

I often think that ritual gives us something to do with our hands rather than our heads, performing a set of actions that root us into our being again. Ritual is different from worship: a matter of instinct rather than construction, a gesture that lets us weave significance in the moment. It is so undemanding, so simple, almost passive. You follow the steps, and they take you down to find what you need.

anything, not for a blessing or a wish, or for knowledge that I can’t find myself. I just need to make contact with a place that holds a residue of hierophany, to feel the connection between myself and the many other lost souls who have come here, not knowing quite what to say. Rather than to say any prayer, I needed to take care of this place, to make a gesture towards an invisible continuity of yearning. The mysteries it holds are not revelations or miracles, but the flow of unknowing across the centuries, the connection of wanting to understand. In this moment, it seems to me that talking to God does not require faith, but practice. It is a doing rather than a believing, an act of devotion reciprocated in the same way it is made: mutely, through the hands and the feet, the myriad attentions of the body.

I’m also wary of stealing from traditions that don’t speak to my own time and place, bending them out of shape and only partially understanding them. I’ve noticed how often we do that, cherry-picking the comforting parts of complex religious traditions—usually the aspects that tell us everything’s okay—and ignoring the counterbalancing obligations, particularly those that involve careful introspection. There are some very good reasons for being selective in our spiritual beliefs: religions tend to be tainted with the worldly prejudices of those who minister them, and it’s worthwhile sifting these out to find the gems of beautiful thought contained within them. But for those who, like me, only ever want to sift, there’s a real risk of justifying our worst behaviour. I often see internet memes that tell us we are just as we are meant to be, God-made, and that leaves me deeply uneasy. I may not have a divine voice whispering in my ear to render it all clear, but I’m fairly certain that God—however you conceive of them—didn’t plan for any of us to be racist. Every one of us has some kind of work to do. A spiritual practice that blankets us in the analgesic of self-acceptance is just a bandage for our narcissism. Congregations—ones that are allowed to express diversity of thought—hold us to account.

We are more moth than we know: small, frustrated, capable of only tickling a world that we wish would feel our heft. We share that attraction towards the brightest object in our field of view, an equal fascination with candles and conflagrations. We sense the danger, but we can’t look away. In fact we are drawn to circle it endlessly, getting closer and closer until it consumes us. Even when we think the sky might be falling, we stay to watch. It is elemental to us, this alertness, this panicked, flitting attention.

“Are they yours?” She gazed at them mildly for a few moments. “Yes,” she said. “All mine.” “Have you read them all?” “Of course,” she said. “No use just owning them.”

But play is serious. Play is absolute. Play is the complete absorption in something that doesn’t matter to the external world, but which matters completely to you. It’s an immersion in your own interests that becomes a feeling in itself, a potent emotion. Play is a disappearance into a space of our choosing, invisible to those outside the game. It is the pursuit of pure flow, a sandbox mind in which we can test new thoughts, new selves. It’s a form of symbolic living, a way to transpose one reality onto another and mine it for meaning. Play is a form of enchantment.

Change is the restless bedrock on which we’re founded. Lauren Olamina, the heroine of Octavia E. Butler’s Earthseed series, makes a god out of change itself, “the only lasting truth in the world.” For her, the sacred is found in adaptation. Perhaps this is what I’m seeking, too, the ability to step into the world’s flux, to travel with it rather than rasping against it, to let my own form dance across it. “We do not worship God,” Lauren writes in verse. “We perceive and attend to God / We learn from God . . . We shape God.” It’s as good a truth as any, as holy a space in which to rest our minds: We are not the passive recipients of the numinous, but the active constructors of a pantheon. We make the change, and it makes us. Entering into that exchange—knowing the depths of permanence and the restlessness of movement—is the work of a lifetime.

common attention and scattered disparate meanings across the firmament. When we look for enchantment to give us direct, concrete revelations, we miss the point. It is too big for us to swallow all at once. It teaches us in constellations, and invites us to undertake the slow, lifelong work of assimilating a moment.

Naming is a form of power. It cements a commitment to the subject of your expertise and, in the case of nature, often an ancestral continuity, too. Naming is an assertion of meaning, and in turn it creates meaning. It allows us to greet the things we know like old friends.

I think I’m beginning to understand that the quest is the point. Our sense of enchantment is not triggered only by grand things; the sublime is not hiding in distant landscapes. The awe-inspiring, the numinous, is all around us, all the time. It is transformed by our deliberate attention. It becomes valuable when we value it. It becomes meaningful when we invest it with meaning. The magic is of our own conjuring.